She said it was painful for all the survivors to ‘reconnect with a world which had lived without you, children who didn’t know you, families who thought you were dead’. Those who saw her in the camp remembered that what kept her going was a belief that she had to return to bring up her daughter. So Claude understood that their life from then on needed to re-establish the bonds that had been ruptured in the year spent apart, and she recognized too that the most important thing for her mother was the need to listen to those others who had suffered with her the same shame of hunger and dysentery, the fear and ever present despair, in order to try and pick up an ordinary life once again. ‘No one who had not witnessed this hell could understand, only those who had, became her new world.’ On one never to be forgotten occasion Claude overheard an old friend comment, ‘So, life at Ravensbrück wasn’t quite so bad as they’d have us believe then?’ My mother replied in an icy tone, ‘Every morning we had to step across the remains of those who had died in the night as the rats would start with the eyes.’
There was a range of reasons for the women’s silence that in some cases lasted their entire lives. Some could not speak of the camps because it was a hell they wanted to expunge from their minds; others because of the shame of surviving, the shame that it might be assumed they had been raped or had collaborated in the camp or the feeling that they were in some way responsible for their fate. They did not want to speak and others did not want to listen. According to the historian Debra Workman: ‘Unable or unwilling to believe the accounts, an often indifferent public was not yet ready to hear their testimonies, and by 1947, editors no longer accepted the manuscripts of the deportees.’ Fellow historian Annette Wieviorka summarized the nation’s difficulty in responding to the deportation in the early postwar years with a statement that the deportees attributed to several editors: ‘Enough of cadavers! Enough of torture! Enough of stories of the resistance! We need to laugh now!’
And so, in November 1945, at the first meeting of the survivors’ group called ADIR (Association Nationale des Anciennes Déportées et Internées de la Résistance) it was quickly recognized that the organization should be for women only, and only those who had been deported to the camps because of their work in the resistance, and that their first duty should be to testify. They preferred, at a time when the public perception of the resistance was unashamedly masculine, to keep the organization small and focused on allowing members to extend the links established in the camps, to provide moral, medical and social support to all survivors as well as honouring the memory of their dead comrades. They knew that their experience had been peculiar to them and could not be shared with a male group whose suffering might have been equally appalling but was different. This was not about promoting their actions, about which they remained modest, to the world at large. One of their most important activities was always to bear witness on behalf of those who had not survived.*
ADIR grew out of two experiences: on the one hand that of the Amicale des Prisonnières de la Résistance (APR), which united a small group of female resisters who had been imprisoned in Paris during the summer of 1942 and had recruited friends and family members to prepare care packages for women they had befriended in prison, especially for those alone and scheduled for deportation; and on the other hand, the experience of the deportees in Ravensbrück. Having foreseen the difficulties many would face in returning to a normal life, given their grave physical and mental state, they had decided to form an organization as soon as possible to provide aid and support to the survivors.
Geneviève de Gaulle, niece of the new French leader, within weeks of leaving the Swiss sanatorium where she had gone to recuperate, began to hold a series of meetings with prominent Swiss citizens to raise awareness of the deportees’ plight and of the need for long-term convalescence that many would require. At the same time fellow deportee Irène Delmas, who had been one of the first to be released, was already working to hand out care packages. While in Switzerland, de Gaulle and Delmas met and, realizing that they shared a vision, decided to merge the two groups. The women of the ADIR did not view themselves as agents of change nor as political actors; rather, they identified themselves personally and collectively as ‘patriots’ – the wives, mothers and daughters of France who had voluntarily taken the same risks as the men in defence of their country; had suffered the same punishments, and now had united to care for one another and obtain the rights and recognition that they had legitimately earned. Their intense wartime experiences transformed these women, and after the war many of them continued to operate outside the traditional roles assumed by French women.
As Debra Workman has explained:
At a time when women in France had only just received the right to vote and still remained legally under the guardianship of their husbands and fathers, the women of ADIR chose to organize themselves on the basis of gender, as formerly imprisoned women resisters, independent of established political parties and direct institutional affiliation. This choice reflected their awareness of their unique circumstances and their belief that their wartime activism had been little understood or accepted. Their conviction that no one would speak for them if they did not do so for themselves determined the ‘innovative character’ of the ADIR from its inception.